Selected Letters and Journals

"The wonderful thing about Byron’s letters is the extraordinary variety of tones that they have. They convey a whole range of different personalities wrapped up in a single individual. Byron can be extremely funny, he has an extraordinary verbal dexterity. There’s a wonderful letter, for example, describing a drunken night out with Sheridan, the dramatist, by then quite elderly. They all get absolutely rat-arsed. And then they have to get Sheridan down the stairs to his carriage, a tremendously difficult operation. Byron writes, “We had to get him down the damned, corkscrew staircase”, and you have this idea of all these men – themselves drunk – trying to negotiate Sheridan, who was quite a large figure, down this narrow, spiral staircase. What fun that is. “The wonderful thing about Byron’s letters is the extraordinary variety of tones that they have.” But then at the end of Byron’s life, a totally different figure emerges in the letters he wrote to Teresa Guiccioli, who was his so-called last great love. (Actually, she wasn’t his last great love. There was a Greek boy called Lukas Chalandritsanos, to whom Byron did not write letters because he was there all the time in Byron’s last days.) But Byron’s letters to Teresa are totally different. They are written with this extraordinary ardour and warmth, and, for Byron, amazing vulnerability. When you read them, you think this man is so vulnerable, has so little confidence, is so in need of reassurance from this much younger woman – she was only in her twenties, if that. She is calling the shots and Byron is desperate. It’s a completely different tone of voice. And then when Byron is writing to his publisher, John Murray, another personality comes out. A mixture of intimacy and awareness that this man is his commercial agent, but also that he, Byron, was a lord. There was a lot of snobbery about Byron, he really did stand on his aristocratic dignity a lot of the time. And that comes out. Though at the same time he’s very charming with Murray, he wants to keep him on-side. So you get this vast range of voices in a single correspondence. And that’s what makes any volume of Byron’s letters a great pleasure to pull from the shelves and leaf through. I think there is up to a point. Keats’s were of course absolutely marvellous. In a way I wish I’d included those, because he is as good a letter writer as Byron. Byron kept his bardic stance for the public man, but very seldom do we find a sense of his poetic calling. I think he felt it was something which a man like him – a lord like him – didn’t need to show. That it was almost infra dig to be the poet, because that’s not what noble lords did. It was a talent. It was of course the talent that was to make him famous. But all his life he wanted to be seen as the Regency dandy boxing aristocrat, doing manly things and manly things with women. The poetry was meant to seem nonchalant, although we know that it was, in his case, compulsive. He had to be a poet, and you realise this when you read his poetry. Yes, I think in a way he was. And this comes out in the letters too. It’s another of the multi-faceted qualities that he has."